3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Idle factories and available capital pose a puzzle: why does an economy fail to put them back to work? In this 1939 symposium article, Emil Lederer argues that recovery depends not simply on lower wages or prices, but on opportunities for investment that established industries may no longer provide. His distinction between expanding existing production and creating new industries gives technological unemployment a concrete setting: machines can reduce costs without generating enough demand to reemploy displaced workers. Against assurances drawn from nineteenth-century growth, he asks whether the conditions that once made adjustment possible still hold. The economic frontier, he concludes, is not closed—but spontaneous expansion cannot be counted on. Readers can discover why, in his account, deliberate demand creation and a reconsideration of thrift become questions of democratic economic security.
Germany's colonies, stripped away at Versailles and held under mandate, are the immediate provocation of this 1939 study, which recasts their loss as economic strangulation rather than wounded vanity. Yet Thurnwald's ambition is systematic: colonization as a recurring human phenomenon, older than capitalism, whose methods he compares across Portuguese slave-raiding, the Spanish encomienda among the Maya of Yucatán, the Dutch cultivation system in Java, the French Code noir and St. Domingue, and British expansion from Virginia to the Gezira cotton scheme. His own Deutsch-Neu-Guinea supplies the opening case, from Rabaul's plantations to goldfields opened by aircraft. He rejects a purely Marxist reading of empire, frames expansion as a biological and social movement of peoples, and ties its future to National Socialist colonial policy.
Kolonisation gehört zu den großen bewegenden und Geschichte schaffenden Kräften der menschlichen Gemeinschaften aller Völker und Zeiten.
English translation: “Colonization belongs among the great moving and history-making forces of human communities in all peoples and ages.”
A wage cut can lower a firm’s costs while shrinking the market for its products. This tension anchors Emil Lederer’s 1939 article, presented here in French translation, on whether wages cause economic crises and whether reducing them hastens recovery. Lederer challenges both capital-shortage and underconsumption theories by asking when cheaper production actually prompts new investment—and when it merely redistributes purchasing power. His distinctive move is to connect the business cycle with differences among occupations and industries: construction costs, skilled workers’ earnings, and housing affordability matter in ways an average wage index conceals. His case for targeted subsidies rather than general wage cuts offers a concrete way to examine how policy might lower investment costs without reducing workers’ incomes.
Le niveau des salaires est une abstraction, de même que le niveau général des prix.
English translation: “The wage level is an abstraction, just as the general price level is.”
What mathematics should economists learn, and how should it be taught? In this 1939 review of R. G. D. Allen’s Mathematical Analysis for Economists, Gerhard Tintner values economic applications over the physical examples customary in calculus textbooks. Constrained optimization is his telling case: a technique central to economics receives the sustained attention economists need. His praise also draws a useful distinction between teaching mathematical tools through consumer choice, monopoly, and production, and presenting a continuous economic theory. Yet the book’s predominantly static approach leaves dynamic problems underrepresented. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for graduate training: mathematical instruction should prepare economists to follow current research, while its omissions should guide their supplementary study.
Hayek’s objection to Keynes’s wartime financing proposal begins with agreement: compulsory savings could restrain civilian spending more fairly and efficiently than inflation. In this short 1939 article, republished here in 1997, the dispute turns instead on what happens when those savings become repayable. Keynes envisages releasing deposits during a postwar slump; Hayek asks whether Parliament could withstand demands for repayment when increased spending would be dangerous. The article offers a concrete encounter between economic design and political pressure, rather than a rehearsal of their wider theoretical disagreements. Hayek’s tentative alternative—converting savers’ government claims into interests in industrial capital—sharpens the central question: how can a workable wartime policy avoid creating an unstable peacetime obligation?
Profit maximization need not settle a price when a sole buyer faces a sole seller. In this theoretical note, Gerhard Tintner makes that difficulty concrete through a steel producer purchasing iron ore from a monopolist supplier. His distinctive question is when buyer control, seller control, and joint profit maximization yield the same outcome. The conditions for their agreement prove exceptional: ordinarily, static analysis establishes a bargaining range rather than a unique input price. By tracing how price-setting authority changes the result, readers can distinguish the constraints imposed by demand and production costs from the distribution of gains between the parties. Tintner’s extension to union–employer wage bargaining sharpens the stakes: on his account, bargaining power, shaped especially by political forces, determines what profit-maximizing equations leave unresolved.
Discarding observations can make a statistical test more defensible. In this 1939 mathematical note, Gerhard Tintner confronts a difficulty in time-series analysis: successive differencing may remove a smooth trend, but it also creates correlations even when the original errors are independent. His response is to select differences built from disjoint observations, allowing their variances to be compared using familiar significance tests. He applies the same selection principle to lagged products in deriving a serial-covariance distribution. The note offers a precise encounter with the trade-off between retaining information and securing a tractable sampling distribution. Readers can see how the observations chosen determine which tests become available—and why the assumptions of normality, independence and a sufficiently smooth trend matter.
What makes consumer-credit exercises useful in teaching financial mathematics? In this brief review, Gerhard Tintner assesses Charles H. Mergendahl and Le Baron R. Foster’s pamphlet as a supplement to high-school and college textbooks. He distinguishes an adequate introduction to credit concepts and calculations from the exercises themselves, which he finds thoughtfully designed, interesting and stimulating. The review offers a concise curricular judgement: its interest lies in Tintner’s emphasis on the quality of practice problems, rather than merely their number or subject matter.
The multiplier, in Keynes and Kahn, arrives as a timeless ratio linking investment to income; Machlup's 1939 intervention insists it can only be understood as a dated process. Public wages become shop receipts, which become factory receipts, which only later become incomes to be spent again — and between the rounds lie inventories, pay dates, and spending habits. He builds an 'income propagation period,' tentatively about three months, to measure how long expenditure takes to become income anew, and shows that a higher propensity to consume yields a larger eventual multiple but a longer road to it, so a government minding the coming fiscal year may collect only a fraction. Leakages, he adds, need not mean hoarding; saved funds may repay debt or buy securities, deferring rather than destroying the next round of spending.
For a discussion of time lags, transition phases, and other intertemporal relationships, Keynesian terminology is not well suited.
Rearmament makes some materials urgently scarce—but which civilian uses should surrender them? In this 1939 magazine article, republished in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek argues that ranking industries by national importance cannot answer that question: an essential industry may substitute cheaply, while a less essential one may consume far more resources to replace the same input. Through exchanges of tin and copper, he shows how relative prices can reveal sacrifices that administrative quotas conceal. His objection to rationing rests not on officials’ incompetence, but on the production alternatives they would need to know. The article connects this informational problem to military choices between competing supplies, while leaving questions of equity and government finance unresolved. It offers a precise account of why wartime urgency, in Hayek’s view, makes economic calculation more necessary rather than less.
The Ricardo Effect anchors this revision of Hayek's trade-cycle theory: when consumer-goods prices rise while money wages stay fixed, falling real wages make short-period, labour-using methods far more profitable than durable machinery, and firms retreat from the more capitalistic techniques. The result overturns the acceleration principle, for a rise in consumer demand can shrink demand for capital goods. Granting Keynes his unemployment and sticky wages, Hayek still rejects aggregate demand as a sufficient guide; he disaggregates capital into a vertical hierarchy of stage-specific industries and introduces the 'Quotient' to measure how slowly investment yields consumer goods. A boom ends not when all resources are employed but when the structure of production outruns the flow of goods, exposing a scarcity of capital whatever the money rate of interest does.
It is a cumulative process, indeed an explosive process, leading further and further away from an equilibrium position till the stresses become so strong that it collapses.
Can democratic governments secure recovery without sacrificing the freedoms that make it worthwhile? In this condensed round-table statement, Gottfried Haberler distinguishes falling unemployment from rising production, consumption, and economic welfare: Germany’s apparent advantage changes when armaments, leisure, and consumer choice enter the comparison. His distinctive—and contentious—proposal is to separate authoritarian techniques of cost control from authoritarian political aims. He attributes stalled recovery in France and the United States partly to premature wage and price increases, and suggests that democracies could restrain these pressures and remove productive bottlenecks without adopting comprehensive regimentation. The statement makes visible a difficult tension between employment and freedom while leaving open how democratic institutions might implement the controls he recommends.